


Push Your Old Numbers

by cailures



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 11:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2189556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cailures/pseuds/cailures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Art always really hates Angie's visits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Push Your Old Numbers

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #13.

Angie’s never been subtle, as hard as she's tried. She stopped by Art’s apartment a couple of times a week, ostensibly to update him on the goings on around the station while he was on suspension. Art knew what it’s really about and so did Angie, but he pretended naivety and listened to her bullshit mostly because it was the most irritating possible option.

Angie wanted him to internalize that he was a shitty partner to Beth, and more importantly, in her view, to Angie. He’s already knew he was a failure to Beth. He had pretended her problems would be fixed if only they worked more cases so she could spend more time at work to distract her from whatever was wrong in her personal life, if only she had the right meds, if only she would open up to her therapist. Even Maggie Chen’s death couldn’t snap him out of thinking like that. He could have dug—Maggie's cover was tissue thin—he could have cracked the whole clone thing open. But he didn't and Beth killed herself. A lack of loyalty hadn't come into it.

Mostly, she wanted him to crack and tell her everything. It obviously not wasn't going to happen, so Art had to endure her increasingly blunt questions, and her trying to needle it out of him. He wanted to tell her that there's a reason why all of her partners had handled most of the interrogation of suspects, but that would have antagonized her.

Angie wasn't going to bug his apartment or try to tail him around town if he played along. Angie wanted to be righteous and hold the higher ground, and Art hasn't given her enough for her to justify going that far to herself. It was a delaying tactic, at some point she'll figure out the mental gymnastics necessary and go for it, but he wasn't eager to push up the time frame.

This time she'd brought him Tim Horton's, maybe her current partner had given her some pointers on how to play good cop and coax info out, or maybe she wanted coffee. The whole thing had barely begun, and Art was already sick of trying to second guess everything. He was only half paying attention to her story about how a perp had tried to con his way out of lockup. It was a very unsubtle metaphor about how even well-meaning cops can get taken in by charming criminals. She probably just wanted coffee then.

The climax of the story was soon approaching, so soon she'll start in again about Sarah or Allison or Helena. It's a good quality in a detective, to grab onto something and not let go until you understand it. Beth had that. Art still did. Or rather, it's good in moderation. They'd had too much and because of it Beth's dead and Art has harbored a serial killer in his apartment.

Of all of the clones—all the women with Beth's face—Art thought he should have the hardest time dealing with Helena, or maybe Sarah, but they were easy. They were both so different from Beth. Sarah fooling him for as long as she did was bitter, made his mouth fill up all the way with bile, but it was really him fooling himself. 

Instead, Allison was the hardest. Looking at Allison was like looking in a fun house mirror of Beth. Art could look at her and see what Beth might have been if she hadn't latched onto the law to provide the framework to channel her anxiety through. Allison had turned to home and family instead of career, but she'd still ended up self-medicating with booze and pills. Allison in rehab was almost more than Art could deal with, so he didn't. He didn't push Angie to lay off her harassment of Allison. He pretended that the best thing he could do for anyone, for the clones, was to spend his days taking pictures of a bunch of religious freaks, and cross reference them against mug shots. He didn’t let himself dwell on the idea that if only he’d wised up and dragged Beth to rehab, everything would have worked out.

It wasn't not true. Beth almost certainly would have checked herself out immediately and wouldn’t have appreciated him damaging her career like that. Or she would have gone, and Helena would have put a bullet or a knife through her when she couldn’t protect herself. It probably wasn't true and Art knew torturing himself about it wasn't going to help anyone. The photos thing was marginally helpful, at least.

Art realized that he'd been paying absolutely no attention to Angie, but she was still monologuing along about truth and justice and appeared to have been satisfied by his intermittent nodding along.

"You know, Art, this guy kind of reminded me of Sarah Manning," she started, finally getting to the point Art had glimpsed ten minutes ago, and paused significantly.

"How so?" Art asked, obligingly.

"He cheated an old lady out of her pension, and she still came down to the station to vouch for him. The beat cop that locked him up was swearing we had the wrong guy after a couple of hours. That's exactly how Sarah's victims behave." She punctuated her statement by draining the rest of her cup. Her tell that she was about to get down to business and be out of his hair in five, ten minutes tops.

"Angie, you should drop this. I keep telling you that you need to drop it." Art replied by rote.

"Why do you keep trying so hard to protect her? Did you fuck her or something? Was that it?" Angie asked.

For a second Art thought she was talking about Beth. They had slept together. Once. It wasn't a big deal, it hadn't been a big deal. She'd followed him back to his apartment after they'd hit the bar together to look at the files on the Gunderson case in a different environment to try to shake something new loose. To spot something that they'd overlooked. It wasn't the first time they'd done this, but had been the last. Art had done the math on the timing, it would have been not long after she first found out about being a clone.

He'd spread out all the pictures of the crime scene on floor of his living room while Beth got them both another beer. She was drunk, so was he, but neither were drunk enough to make the exercise entirely useless. She plopped down on the floor and took a long swig from her beer. Art had watched her throat work until he forced himself to look away.

"Are we sure that this knife is the actual murder weapon?" Beth had asked, or she'd asked something similar to that. Art didn't remember this part all that clearly. She leaned closer to him to point at a picture of the knife in question bagged and tagged.

He'd turned to reply, and her face was much closer to his than he'd thought it would be. There'd been a moment of silence punctuated only by the sound of the photographs shushing against the floor as she shifted her weight. She leaned in to kiss him lightly and he froze.

Her slightly parted mouth was hot against his, and Art let himself forget all of the reasons why he shouldn't do this. He had been good at that, at self-delusion. He was still good at that. He brought his hand up to touch her hair.

She made a little noise of surprise against his lips and opened her mouth. She tasted like the shitty light beer she liked and that he kept specially stocked for her and a little like wax, probably from the lipstick he'd watched her reapply in the mirror behind the bar. It had been overwhelming.

After a beat, she pulled back to look in his eyes. Art had felt a cold rush of shame--it had been a joke, she was drunker, much drunker than he thought and she'd mistaken him for Paul even though that made no sense--and dropped his in time to see her hands come up to start unbuttoning her shirt. 

The last clear memory he has of that night is of her leaning back on the pictures of Henry Gunderson's dead body with her shirt fallen down around her elbows and lace framing her breasts. She'd grinned and said, "Well, dipshit, are you going to get with the program and take off yours too?"

He didn't let himself think about the rest. The way they'd only realized they were screwing up the evidence pictures only after they were mostly naked. How her breasts felt in his hands. The look on her face as she came.

"Sarah Manning? No, Angie," Art replied, once he realized what she was really asking.

Something in his face must have betrayed him, because Angie smirked a little. She said, "Don't give me any more of that bullshit, Art, about not investigating her or Allison Hendricks. Beth deserved better. She deserved a better partner than you." She then got up and went to the door, leaving her paper cup behind, which was typical of her.

Two days later, there was a GPS tracker affixed to the back bumper of his car. He stuck it to some random civilian's car and resolved to contact Allison about Angie when he got back.

Then he saw Helena running through the mist and all of his plans got smashed to shit. Beth had been good at both. Running and wrecking any plans he tried to make. He never could keep up.


End file.
